I have been carrying a vivid memory with me for over 50 years. In it, my father is chasing me around the little circle of dining area, kitchen, corridor, and living room that existed in our apartment. In my memory, this has happened already, to me and to my older sister. I don’t know, in actuality, if it was a one-time event or recurring. As I am running away from him, I suddenly realize there is just no way I can manage to escape. He is bigger, and faster, and I am small, not as strong. Sooner or later he will catch up with me. I stop, crushed by the futility of the effort, and turn around to accept the inevitable slap in my face I know is coming. I stand in my small body facing him as he is coming my way. I close my eyes as tightly as I can, contracting the muscles around them, raise my face in his direction, and wait. The burning sensation of that slap is still imprinted on my cheek. More significant by far is the impossibility, to this day, of having a visceral understanding of how a grown man could look at his five year old daughter, see her stand the way I remember me standing, and still deliver the slap. What could possibly make it appear to be the right thing to do?

I have no awareness of what the “transgression” was that led to this event. I do know that making me submit to his will was a major project for my father. As it is for so many parents in relation to so many children.

From Demand to Request

The essential form of interaction between adults and children is based on the premise that adults tell children what to do. I was well aware of that, as a permanent insult, while growing up. I have often wondered about pushing the limits. I still do as I observe children interacting with their parents. What if a child persists in saying “no” to the parent? How far would the parent, almost any parent, let it go before threatening the child? As the threats escalate, where can the child find the increasing strength and courage required to persist? Behind it all, every child knows the parent’s superior strength, the possibility of physical violence, always present, even if never exercised. I am surprised and so grateful that any of us emerge from childhood able to stand up to authority.

Punishment is always present at the other end of a demand. When I make a demand, its essential message is that the only thing that matters is that I get my way. If I don’t, and I have the power to do so, I will punish you. If I do, I will reward you.

Shifting from making demands to making requests means embracing the possibility that the other person will say “no” and accepting it. It means letting go of using any kind of power we have to punish the other person, adult or child, for saying “no.” Without that willingness, without accepting that others are free to choose, without releasing the habit of trying to restrict others’ choice by holding the threat of negative consequences, anything we ask of another will appear like a demand.

I am totally unsurprised that people in positions of authority – parents, teachers, managers – usually balk at the notion of making requests and not demands. A teacher once said it most eloquently when I proposed that they make requests and not demands: “Oh, no. What you are talking about is democracy in the classroom. There will be no democracy in my classroom. I am the dictator – benevolent dictator, but dictator.” That was the day I decided I wouldn’t bring NVC to teachers, because I was so identified with the child’s perspective that I couldn’t recover from my own pain fast enough to shift into an empathic perspective with the teacher.

I have since learned that a less stark version of inviting the shift to requests is orders of magnitude more appealing to people, and I have never once had anyone reject it out of hand like this teacher did. I tell people that every time they get someone to do something just because they have the power to deliver unpleasant consequences (read: punishment) to them if they don’t, they lose that person’s goodwill and trust, and to be as sparing as possible in exercising that form of interaction. Very few understand the full radical implications of this statement.

Punishment, Choice, and Violence

Punishment takes many forms in adult interactions. When power differences are present, we can lose opportunities for promotion or meaningful projects, we can be fired if the “no” is big enough, we can have our access to resources restricted. We can also be imprisoned, hospitalized, or even tortured. Even within equal relationships such as friendship, neighborhood, or between lovers, we still habitually punish and reward each other for saying “no” and “yes.” Even if the punishment can be very subtle, it is nonetheless punishment. If I don’t smile at you for three days after you didn’t change the diapers of our baby, you know all too well it wasn’t a request, and you feel the force of the punishment.

We all know the experience of receiving a demand. When I most recently asked people from about ten different countries what it was like for them when they experience a demand, the responses were quite unanimous. People described the experience as one of helplessness, being overpowered, discouraged, or at times indifferent. They had an experience of closing down in response. Beyond the obvious lack of freedom, the personal cost was also of connection and of respect, both in terms of not being respected and losing respect for the person making the demand.

Why would we want to inflict this experience on anyone else?

Carol and James Gilligan

We are told that punishment deters people from continuing to engage in harmful behavior. If I had any doubt that punishment, itself, is part and parcel of the system that perpetuates violence, none is left after reading James Gilligan’s Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes, a book I have referenced here more than once. The intimate links between punishment and shame and between shame and violence are described and explored in painful detail. Moreover, Gilligan convinced me beyond remaining doubt that the very system of punishment we have created is itself a form of violence, often enough taking the very same forms that the people being punished engage in.
I will forever be grateful to Marshall Rosenberg for bringing home the point that violence can only emerge from an experience of unmet needs. A human being who has access to choice, to dignity, to love is not the one to commit violence. When we punish people, we deprive them of their human dignity. While people may choose not to do certain things because of fear, the longterm consequences are increased violence. This is the horrific tragedy of any war on terror I have ever heard of.

Transcending Punishment and Reward

If we want to create societies in which people thrive, it will take all of us recovering from the millennia of systems of punishment and reward. Some may wonder why I am including rewards. Aren’t rewards a more humane way to motivate people to take positive action?

I remain uncompromising. We can only choose “yes” when we can choose “no.” The promise of reward makes the option of saying “no” challenging. The absence of a reward is its own form of punishment. Either way, we don’t experience the fundamental human access to choosing from within, knowing what we want, why we do what we do. Rewards, whether in school or in the workplace, appear to decrease performance.

I have no doubt that all of us suffer from the system of punishment and rewards that has been the prevalent form for so long. Alas, we have grown so used to this suffering, that we are not fully aware of its consequences, or see them as inevitable. More tragically, even when we know, even when we actively want to transform them, we continue to enact them. I am grateful to Dominic Barter, who applied NVC principles in a systemic way to create a restorative justice system – Restorative Circles – which is being widely used in Brazil and slowly becoming known elsewhere. He is the one who taught me that because of the prevalence of punitive systems, if we don’t consciously create an alternative, we will default back to punishment and reward, even in our personal interactions.

Not all of us are going to participate in large scale experiments to create restorative systems. Not all of us will take up any cause and fight for it. Most of us, always, will only live our own personal lives, hoping for the best for ourselves and our loved ones. We can still become personal pioneers, commit to overcoming the habit, commit to creating conscious methods of attending to our relationships so that we work out differences instead of imposing our will. At the very least, we can begin by committing to making requests, providing others with the basic access to exercising full choice.

5 Responses to “Punishment and Rewards”

yes, this is so basic to the quality of human relating, yet its worst manifestation has become all-pervasive in our entire civilization……..from the primal first conversations between parent and child, to the halls of world government.

i found myself reading accounts of politicians and past top advisors to most (if not all) of our recent presidents, in analyses of how recent US wars began and proceeded. They admit that despite offering seriously studied advice against the possibility of US success if war is instigated, the presidents insisted on going to war………..and these ‘subordinates’ felt no choice but to acquiesce.

even though the well-known ‘reason’ for all this catastrophic behavior is explained as political rather than any other reasoning…………..it is clear what destruction this practice creates, world-wide.

my point is also that such norms have pervaded all of our existance as a civilization and are now in the position of endangering our very existance………..and still, proceeds without much consideration, although with much emotional pain and damage to all involved.

often, in my own personal experience and observing others, i see a deeper level of this destruction: a powerful person’s REQUEST, even if stated as such, is STILL too often percieved by the subordinate one as an inherent demand……and is acquiesced to as if it were a demand……….

I have never read such B.S. in all my life. In a perfect world with perfect people perhaps your fantasy of never demanding others to follow any code of conduct would work, but as we know too well that is not reality. I don’t believe in corporal punishment for children but I do believe in rules, not because as a parent I want to “show who is boss” but because my job is to protect my child fro doing harmful things to others and himself. Because the fact is people do horrible things to other people and to say to punish them would be destructive is nonesense. No one hates war more than myself and I agree we should go to any and all lengths to avoid this type of confrontation, but to think that that the world would be one big happy place without some controls on behavior is pure fantasy.

In my view, you appear to have been conditioned to see existence according to the premise that wild, living beings, especially humans, need to be “controlled”. Are children or all humans predisposed to harm themselves or others unless they are “controlled” by an outside authority? We have the many examples of pre-modern cultures in which people were intrinsically motivated towards cooperation to demonstrate that the current system of reward and punishment (or winners and losers) is not the “natural” state of life. The fact that these examples of human behavior exist suggest that what we see today is not necessarily the “norm”. I find it interesting that you felt compelled to denigrate Miki’s offering of a possibility for creating a world based on “conscious methods of attending to our relationships so that we work out differences instead of imposing our will” (to quote her). I believe in this vision of life. I and many others see NVC as a way through this perpetual cycle of violence. Am I then full of BS or do I sound delusional to you? I have to admit that I don’t have much empathy for your point of view. Despite your professed desire for peace, your attitudes and perceptions, which are shared by most humans, can only bring about more of the same: a state of continual conflict.

I am replying to both of you at once, because what I want to say to Randall may be meaningful for Patricia to read, and can indirectly serve as a response to her, too.

Randall, you say you see deep value in what I offer and in the NVC perspective. I get a sense that you are passionate about a vision that is likely similar to the one I painted in broad strokes in the blog post you both read. I get a sense, also, from reading your comment, that you are deeply longing to find a way to transcend and transform the state of ongoing war and conflict in the world. When you read comments like Patricia, I imagine it’s challenging for you to maintain the hope that such change is possible.

If my above understanding is accurate, then I feel aligned with you. At the same time, I differ from you in a deep way in terms of our response to Patricia. It’s not so much that I was happy to receive her response. I don’t imagine anyone enjoys being told that what they wrote is the biggest BS someone has read in their entire life. However, to me this is where the work begins. It’s when I get messages like Patricia’s that I am most called to demonstrate the very thing I am talking about: how will I respond to her without any punishment? How can I truly keep my heart open and show her, even in a small way, that I can make room for her to be different from me without suffering consequences? I am sad to say that it seems to me that you want to live the vision, and yet you don’t find a way to live it with someone who doesn’t share your views. Can you imagine being Patricia and reading your comment?

The other day I had a conversation with someone where we disagreed about something. We went back and forth while I forgot about my practice, and then I finally realized that I didn’t have any need for her to change her views of what we were discussing. I only wanted to know if she was happy to have the views that she had, knowing that I was happy to have mine. I figured that would mean we would just end the conversation about it right then, until she said that her views were agitating her. That created an opening for me to share some exploratory questions with this woman, and for us to maintain connection.

Is there any way that you could do something similar with Patricia instead of what I see as judging her for having the views she has? I chose not to respond to her, simply because my life is so full and I mostly don’t respond to comments. Had I chosen to respond, I would look for a way to make sense of her experience of my writing.

i think that in all conversations, child to child, adult to adult, child to adult, etc. having choices, being able to dialogue is part of being a free and happy person. Maybe if we could do that more in conversation, life would not be so either one way or the other only for us, but one of many possible good choices. We need multiple choices and be creative in developing them and choosing them.